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The cheapest carbon saving in software is deleting work

Efficiency initiatives chase language choice and hardware. The biggest wins came from jobs nobody needed to run.

The cheapest carbon saving in software is deleting work
The cheapest carbon saving in software is deleting work — XENVORA Photograph: Free computer server room image, Rawpixel (CC0) · Licence

We looked at five teams that measured their compute footprint seriously. In four of them, the largest single reduction came from switching something off.

Audit before you optimise

Nightly jobs whose output nobody reads. Retry loops with no backoff. Metrics scraped at ten times the resolution anyone charts. None of that needs a rewrite; it needs an owner willing to delete it.

Language and runtime choices matter, but they arrive with rewrite costs. Turning off a redundant pipeline is free and immediate.

The greenest instruction is the one you never execute.

Karim Fadel
Energy & Climate Tech
Karim Fadel

Karim measures the energy bill behind modern computing, from datacentre cooling to grid-scale storage.

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